วันศุกร์ที่ 19 ตุลาคม พ.ศ. 2555

Oh-oh, rain coming on 3rd day of 4-day
holiday. Good thing we have a cozy room.

Nan and I are eating dinner on the beach
under the half moon.

Nice storm tonight with all the trimmings
but visibility remains limited.

We had our first 70 degree evening of
the year. We love the heat. Can't wait. Good for dem bones.

You call that heat? When the rain came the temperature dropped down
into the high 80s.

lol. it's 85 here right now. In
another 60 days we'll have probably 120 days in a row of 100+ temps.

"In my experience, the nones are
not rejecting God. They are rejecting doctrinal requirements that they no
longer find believable, along with the rigid structures of many organized
religions. For that reason, the rise of the nones may well be a new kind of
spiritual awakening, one in which doubters are welcome.

"The female teachers who have
always been part of the history of transmission of the wisdom and compassion of
the Buddha have seldom been recognized, or included, in written history."

Stuck in traffic on a bus in Bangkok. How
not exotic!

I used to live not far away on the
mountain side of La Canada and I'm happy to see that the native fauna are
returning. Will wolves be next?

A wonderful interview with the
irrepressible Yoko. "You can see a thousand thoughts flicking through her
brain at once." She's one of my models for aging well.

The return of Top 40, the digital
mechanics of contemporary song writing, and why I can no longer listen to
modern music.

My students, who will graduate after
this term, have made this slide show to remember their days at university. I
wish them all the best in the future.

The problem is not religion but Western
Religion. There is no heresy in Asian religions, probably because of no central
authority, even though authoritarianism abounds in the cultures. Christianity
and Islam are particularly hard on non-believers.

The institution in Thailand is the
Sangha, a rigid hierarchy ruled by the Vinaya, which is important for monks but
not the laity who make merit at whatever temple is close at hand. Despite
attempts at centralized control, Thai Buddhism is very dispersed, localized.
Buddhists seem to me much more tolerant of religious differences than the other
groups.

Raining all morning at
school, electricity out for an hour, projector broken: one of those days!

the projector in my
classrooms for the past two weeks have NOT been operational!

Phra Terry Magness,
Surattano Bhikkhu. My teacher in Chiang Mai- passed away at age 84. He had
advanced Parkinsons. A lifelong jhana meditator he should have no problem with
a good rebirth.

dont start going
against the new religion.....jobs is a magnificant wonderful genius creative
soul who changed the world and saved us from a horrible life of contemplation
and actual human interaction.

By the way,
Littlebang.org is officially down and out. The webhoster has some error. Should
have a temporary solution up today or Wednesday.

I spent 5 classes
teaching how to write an assignment, and still half the students copy something
off the internet as their ONLY 'work'

there are 12 separate
categories for scoring marks

I credit them for what
they do right also. Can't be too harsh, as for most of the students this is the
first time EVER that a teacher has read their writing.

Jildi Mohamad Sjahyour isp is who sends you the internet bill.
If you don't know who that is (because you might be using university or
business internet) there's no easy way to find out.Patricia Barberthere have been no announcements via the
website for 6 months. If you signed up, the automatic email announcing will
recommence when I get the group up and running full time again, maybe at the
end of the year.

End of next month : We'll
be talking about modern revisionist religion - whether Buddhism/religion leads
modern spirituality, or follows it.

The Audience in
Singapore, 2012

The group really welcomed me, and I have been
trying to shed the 3 kilos in weight I added.

Worse yet, more water is coming in from the
north. The Yom river has overflowed in many places in Sukhothai province and
elsewhere.

a
sentence from my student's paper: "So health is very important benefit for
our life, even though health is a function different from body, brain and mind
in face it they are the same they are great deal together for working, if which
one stop action it will has affected to other bodies, they will do suffering to
us, they make us unhappy in the object as sick, illness, especially, is mental
illne

ss, because mental
illness come from our of state unhappy, it make our mind thinking delirious
until having danger to our life, and not only having danger by own oneself but
the other will almost certainly also be affected, furthermore mental illness is
thought of as an illness associated with severe behavioral disturbances such as
violence, agitation and being sexually inappropriate."

"Bangkok residents
should be worried about rainfall rather than the run-off water," he said.
Royol sits on a sub-panel of the Water and Flood Management Commission (WFMC).

Run-off water from
upstream zones will raise the level of the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok by just
3-4 centimetres, a prominent water expert working for the government said
yesterday.

To Royol Chitdon, director of the Hydro and Agro Infomatics
Institute, continued downpours over Bangkok are clearly more of a threat than
the run-off.

The Meteorological
Department forecast rain and downpours for many areas of the country, including
the Central region, from yesterday through next Tuesday.

Bangkok Governor MR Sukhumbhand Paribatra said
separately that the capital's drainage system was capable of dealing with heavy
downpours and river overflow.

Sukhumbhand said the city administration would
not object to a plan by WFMC chairman Plodprasob Surassawadee, who is also the
science minister, to direct a certain amount of water to the sea via Bangkok.

"But please don't use Bangkok as a
floodway. The available system can't deal with run-off water," he said.

It's coming down hard and
steady. I'm guess it's flooding somewhere, not like last year but from too much
water out of the sky. with lots
of lightning and thunder!

Bangkok Post Learning
Manyou: Thanks for asking. SE-ED will be the main distributor but they will put
the book in most local stores. It should be a week before the first books are
actually sold. They aren't in stores yet.

He was born into a very rich family, and was extremely intelligent and
kindhearted. He even knew the languages of animals

Dhanapala to answer
three questions: “ Where is the person’s glow in the morning ? Where is it at
midday ? Where is it in the evening ? ”

Kapila would offer his
own head to him

Dhanapala accepted the
challenge and promised to find the answers in seven days. Six days passed by
and Dhanapala could find on answers, but he was helped by some sympathetic
deities, who transformed themselves into eagles and discussed the answers to
the riddles within earshot of Dhanapala. By listening to their conversation,
Dhanapala discovered the answers to Kapila’s riddles. The answer is that in the
morning a person’s glow is in the face, because people always wash their faces
in the morning to greet a day. During the day, when the weather is hot, people
bathe themselves, splashing water over the chest, so at midday the glow is in
the chest. In the evening, coming home from work, the wash their feet before
going up into the house. Thus in the evening the glow is in the feet.

Prisoners began appearing
on the streets of Bangkok today and people welcomed them. Their job was to
clean the drains to help get the floodwater off the streets more quickly.
Everyone owes them a big thank you, I think. Photo by Surapol Promsaka Na
Sakolnakorn.

Here's another photo by
Surapol today. It shows a very dry Don Mueang airport. Let's hope it stays that
way. I wonder what it looks like now after the evening rain.